One global banking app, 18 countries

The problem

BBVA, a multinational bank founded in 1857, grew by acquiring banks across Europe and Latin America. Every acquisition came with its own mobile app, so the same bank felt like a different product in every country: different navigation, features, and quality; making impossible for teams to collaborate. In 2015 BBVA started a company-wide digital transformation, and releasing a global app was a main pillar of that digital transformation.

The brief: To design one banking app for 18 countries, feels coherent everywhere, and still adapts to local needs and regulation in each market.

My role

I led the initial architecture exploration, then joined the implementation team to help build the design system that made it real, working across teams in Mexico City, Madrid, and Dallas. I was a senior, then lead, UX designer at BBVA's San Francisco innovation office (the former Spring Studio, which BBVA had acquired). This was a systems problem before it was a screen problem. The real work was deciding what stays fixed everywhere and what each market can change, then building a component system disciplined enough to hold that line.

Who I designed for

1. The customer, across 18 countries, ranged from people in major cosmopolitan cities who expect a polished fintech app to first-time mobile-banking users, who find most digital interfaces intimidating. The core flows had to feel obvious to both.

2. The 18 local product and design teams who would build on top of the base system we created and adapt the app locally.

The solution

We treated the app as a platform, not a screen flow. I defined a fixed global core, the flows every BBVA customer uses in every country, and designed those to one high standard. Around it, we designed clear extension points where local teams could add market-specific products, payment rails, and regulatory requirements without breaking the shared experience. Underneath sat a new design system: shared components, patterns, and one visual language every country app was assembled from. This was 2016, when design systems were still novel inside most large companies, so part of the job was getting buy-in across offices, traveling to give talks on atomic and semantic design and mentoring designers in Mexico, Madrid, Turkey, Argentina, and Colombia so they could carry the practice home.

Results

The app the team shipped became the backbone of BBVA's mobile banking. Its App Store rating climbed from 1.8 to 4.8, and Forrester ranked it the best mobile banking app in the world three years running (2017 to 2019), scoring 87 out of 100 in 2017, the highest Forrester had given any bank since the rankings began in 2013. Forrester still cited BBVA as a global leader in 2025. The same transformation seeded BBVA's first AI banking assistant, Blue, which I went on to pitch and design.

*The ranking and rating jump are achievements of a multi-year program and many teams, not one designer. But the improvement in ranking would have never happened without our work on creating one global, coherent app from scratch.

Constraints

Eighteen markets meant 18 sets of regulations and products to reconcile against one system. Distributed teams across four offices meant over-communicating and documenting every decision. And with design systems unfamiliar to most of the organization in 2016, part of the work was simply convincing people the approach was worth adopting.